Intellectual History Research Articles

Reassessing English Romanticism: An Argumentative Analysis of Its Ideological Foundations

This article reexamines the ideological foundations of English Romanticism, challenging traditional narratives that portray the movement as a uniform celebration of emotion, nature, and individual subjectivity. By situating Romanticism within the socio-political and cultural context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the study underscores how rapid industrialization and political upheavals prompted a deliberate counter-response to Enlightenment rationalism. Employing an interdisciplinary framework that integrates ideological critique, cultural studies, and structural analysis, the article undertakes a close textual analysis of key works by seminal Romantic authors. This approach reveals inherent contradictions and contestations within Romantic thought, highlighting the dynamic interplay between individual expression and broader cultural forces. Contemporary scholarly debates are critically engaged to reassess the legacy of Romantic ideology, suggesting that its evolution mirrors broader shifts in literary and intellectual history. Ultimately, the article argues for the continued reassessment of literary movements as a means to uncover deeper cultural and ideological dynamics, offering new perspectives that enrich our understanding of both Romanticism and its enduring influence on modern literary discourse.

Bridging Intellectual Traditions Through a Bi/Multi-Cultural Intellectual Mind

This article examines why and how scholars could bridge intellectual traditions in research by developing the notion of “a bi/multi-cultural intellectual mind”. It begins with outlining the historical emergence of Western-centric dominance in global academia and its consequential unequal worldwide knowledge flows. Drawing on elements from the model of bicultural competence, including attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors, this study suggests research directions for examining individual scholars to bridge intellectual traditions. It emphasizes that individual efforts can bridge intellectual traditions in research truly effectively. This article then highlights research pathways of examining intermediaries in global intellectual history, who successfully navigate Euro-American and their own intellectual traditions. In doing so, it proposes an analytical framework for the study of a bi/multi-cultural intellectual mind. Finally, this study calls for diverse and inclusive approaches to research on bridging intellectual traditions, while encouraging an equal dialogue between Euro-American and other intellectual traditions in the global higher education landscape.

Febvre’s Climate of Sciences. When Human Geography Met Intellectual History (Tome 146, 7e Série, n° 1-2, (2025))

Abstract Although Lucien Febvre left exemplary works of economic and social history and of intellectual and religious history, to dissociate these two aspects of his work would be to overlook his most important methodological contribution in this second area: the concept of the “climate of science” or the “climate” of intellectual activity. In order to reconstruct its development from the 1920s to the 1940s, it is important to show how Febvre constructed a synthesis of proposals formulated by the philosopher Henri Berr, the psychologist Henri Wallon and the physicist Paul Langevin. He was opposed to Ratzel’s deterministic approach to human geography and he considered that all innovative human activities were the result of probabilities of options within a spectrum of possibilities that it was then up to the historian to reconstruct.

The Maya Enlightenment: Towards a Post-Postclassic

Abstract While increased focus in recent decades has been paid to conceptions of time in archaeological interpretation, comparably less attention has been afforded to the way in which we ourselves conceive of time in the construction of chronologies to periodize the past. In this paper, I focus on the tripartite chronology utilized by scholars of the Precolumbian Maya as a case study to explore the potential of a critical approach to archaeological chronologies and periodizations. By examining the chronology's origins and the intellectual histories which underpin it, I demonstrate that the issues at stake are more than questions of temporal accuracy but, rather, matters of reflexivity. Through a process of ‘sublimation’, problematic assumptions and mentalities upon which periodizations were originally constructed are obscured in contemporary usage, leading to the perpetuation of outdated tropes and a conceptual path dependency in narratives of the past. Conversely, appreciating the arbitrary nature of chronological demarcations and treating such frameworks as negotiable and open to revision is a powerful tool in opening up new interpretive possibilities to the narration of the past.

How to Translate Value in Marx’s Capital? Political Economy in Global Perspective

ABSTRACT This article aims to provide a comprehensive political and intellectual history of a topic that has fallen out of favour in recent decades: Marx’s notion of value. While political economy extensively discussed this topic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has been largely overlooked since the late 1990s, when discussions on Marx’s eurocentrism took precedence. This article proposes a novel approach to examining how the actors themselves, including Marx, conceptualised and addressed the challenges of translation and transferability of his notion of value. Firstly, it analyses the transfer between German, French, English, and Russian during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secondly, it examines the adaptation to several vernacular Indian languages during the twentieth century. This particular approach aims to broaden the scope of debates beyond philological concerns, emphasizing their crucial relevance and implications for global political and social dynamics. The article will demonstrate that the translation of ‘wert’ as ‘cost of production’ led to a significant modification of Marx’s theory and its political implications, contributing to the tensions surrounding Marxism and socialist policies during the twentieth century.

Before and Besides Werktreue: (Re)inventing Operatic Staging at the 1930s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Abstract This article examines the role played by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino as a kind of cultural laboratory for experiments in operatic staging in 1930s Italy. Founded in 1933, Florence's opera and arts festival was a key testing ground for ‘modern’ approaches both to set and costume design and to opera direction, two areas in which northern Europe (especially Germany) is normally held to have led the way, and through which the Maggio helped to reinvent Italian mise-en-scène as an act of independent, artistic creation. Setting the festival's overall project in the context of 1930s aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural debates about theatre, opera, and cinema, and drawing on a rich archive of as-yet-unexplored primary source materials, the article retraces an intellectual and cultural history of Italian staging c. 1930 that resonates productively with several present-day critical and scholarly concerns: from changing attitudes to the nineteenth-century operatic canon, to the early stirrings of Regietheater, to the intertwining histories of opera and film.

The Formation of a Waliullahi Public in Eighteenth-Century India

Abstract Shah Waliullah of Delhi, the famous eighteenth-century Naqshbandi, is widely recognized as a major figure in the emergence of Islamic reformist discourse in South Asia, but we still have little sense of the first audiences who engaged with his ideas. This article seeks to further our understanding of the crystallization of this reform-oriented Waliullahi public by recreating the fragmentary biography of his lifelong companion and disciple Nurullah Budhanwi. While he didn't write any books that survive, accounts of Nurullah's life and reports of his oral statements are scattered throughout texts produced by Waliullah's circle, and provide insight into the conflicting intellectual, ethical, and affective responses to Waliullah's thought in his own lifetime. This article demonstrates that Nurullah felt deep concern about what his acceptance of Waliullahi reformist ideas might mean for his material and spiritual life, suggesting that the formation of this new reform-oriented public was a fraught process entailing contestation and negotiation. Nurullah's biography shows us that intellectual histories that rely on discussions of abstract ideas of famous thinkers or the simplistic reconstruction of scholarly networks fail to do justice to the complex life of ideas in the world.

Sergey Alexandrovich Tokarev and the Intellectual Landscape of Soviet Yakutia: A Historical and Hermeneutic Reconstruction

This article is devoted to the Yakut period in the biography of the famous scientist S. A. Tokarev. The Archive of the Yakut Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences contains a corpus of a few ego-documents related to the period of collaboration between Professor Sergei A. Tokarev and the Yakut Institute (1935-1959), the personal fund of the repressed ethnographer and orientalist Gavriil V. Ksenofontov and the historian Vasilii N. Chemezov. The study employs the methodology of “new biographical history” (social personal history), through which the formation of S. A. Tokarev’s individual scientific strategy during the period of early Soviet society’s construction is traced. The intellectual biography is reconstructed in the historical and hermeneutic space of the studied era, which allows the authors to reveal the social context of the historical narrative in which S. A. Tokarev’s scientific worldview was formed. The new interpretation of the scientists’ biography highlights the moment when the academic northern studies commenced in Moscow and the development of regional ethnography in Siberia, while S. A. Tokarev was actively involved in the scientific discourse between the «center» and the «periphery» on both sides of the complex integration process.

Combating racism with critical race theory: Theorizing social movement learning from anti-racism movements in Canada

Despite the success of critical race theory (CRT) in bringing about an intellectual movement that profoundly influenced the setting of a racial justice agenda in educational research since its inception 30 years ago, the material racial inequity still prevails and continues to subordinate people from racialized communities in and beyond the classroom. As such, it is time that we re-examine the way CRT has been interpreted and applied in educational research to better fulfill CRT’s promise of racial justice. The rise of the current wave of anti-racism movements presents a critical moment for such re-examination. This article therefore examines the current and potential engagement with CRT in educational research by analyzing and theorizing CRT-informed social movement learning to illustrate how we can fully realize the anti-racism potential of CRT in educational research. What we learn from the various forms of learning in the anti-racism movements suggest that a combination of anti-racism voices and practices is vital to mobilize learning as enactment of multiple forms of agency to combat racism through critical creative anti-racism struggles. Future CRT educational research can further recognize CRT as an integrated and evolving framework in which the centering of race and racism to illuminate multiple nexus of subordination serves as a starting point to develop anti-racism strategies and that CRT educational research can embrace a form of criticality against racism as practices of critique and creation of alternatives.

Speech Act as a Factor of Socio-Political Change: Stating the Problem

The purpose of this study is to pose the problem of analyzing the relationship between conceptual (linguistic) and social changes, as well as to reveal the role of socio-political speech action of political theorists as key actors in these processes. The article considers the issues of the construction and changes of social and political reality, as well as the role of speech acts in these processes as a special type of social action. According to J. Searle’s general theory of social reality, speech acts are seen as the basis and a necessary condition for socio-political changes. The structure and elements of speech acts are described within the framework of J. Austin’s theory of speech acts, supplemented and formalized by Searle. The article discusses the influence of this theory on the formation of the theoretical and methodological approach of the Cambridge School of Intellectual History, used to understand the analysis of socio-political changes in various societies and historical periods. As an example of such research, the article describes the main elements of the approach of one of the Cambridge School’s founders Quentin Skinner. The analytical tools used by Skinner and his colleagues help to understand the connection between conceptual and social changes in the history of political thought. Considering political theorists as ideologists, Skinner explains through the analysis of political languages and ideological context how authors-ideologists, using statements that are the basis of their theoretical concepts and rhetoric, intentionally take certain actions that change the social reality. The possibilities, attempts and prospects of applying the Cambridge School’s methodology to the Russian history are also considered.

Trade Unions and The British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg

Trade Unions and The British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg

The Paradoxes of Eurasianism. George Vernadsky, Exile Networks, and the Origins of American Ukrainian Studies

The article delves into a little-known role played by historian George Vernadsky, a prominent figure in the Eurasian intellectual movement, in shaping Ukrainian studies in North America both during and following the Second World War. By conducting research in the historian’s personal archives, it examines his extensive intellectual evolution – from his earlier strongly anti-Ukrainian views during the interwar period to his subsequent transformation into a fervent supporter of Ukrainian culture and history. Additionally, the article explores how his network of non-Russian connections played a crucial part in facilitating this transition.

Desire, Bad-faith and Being-for-other Existential Thought in American Psycho

Existentialism is a prominent intellectual movement that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, profoundly influenced modern and postmodern philosophy. Some of Sartres important ideas on freedom, commitment, responsibility, anxiety, and identity are artistically expressed through his fictional work, inspired countless later writers. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, initially criticized for its graphic depictions of violence, has proven to hold deeper philosophical significance. The large number of direct and indirect references to the classics of existentialist fiction demonstrates the solid foundation of existentialist thought, delving into the pathology of the postmodern individual, demonstrates the different manifestations of existential crisis in different times. By American Psycho, Ellis intertwined this new expression of existential thought with the social critique advanced. Through Sartre's existentialist ideas, this dissertation examines the novel's satirical depiction of the empty banality of modern consumer culture, disturbing scenes of excessive violence, and the internal logic of the psychology of the characters' behavior. The novel demonstrates the unique development of the existentialist novel, by exploring the existential state of the postmodern subject in the late twentieth century. It also shows the existential crisis in the postmodern society, through the pathological psychology and behavior of the novel's protagonist

An Intellectual History of Italian Regionalism

An Intellectual History of Italian Regionalism

How Knowledge Travels: Learned Periodicals and the Atlantic Republic of Letters.

Although the Republic of Letters has become today a main area of interdisciplinary research, early North America has remained largely impermeable to this new body of scholarship. In this article I use the category of the Republic of Letters to overcome some of the limitations of the "Atlantic world" paradigm and to shed new light on the intellectual history of eighteenth-century America. Along with studying the means through which American savants gathered information about scholarly trends and recent publications, I also bring to light the strategies they used to actively contribute to the production and organization of knowledge.

‘The Social Pinch’: the visual and gendered world of snuff-taking celebrated and satirised, 1660–1832

ABSTRACT This essay argues for the significance of visual sources in intellectual history, using a case study on the central importance of snuffboxes in eighteenth-century debates regarding politeness, commerce, virtue, and manners. It highlights the authors, artists and advertisers who celebrated snuff-taking in both verbal and visual texts as a positive symbol of elegance, sociability and the transformative effects of polite commerce. And it analyses the highly sophisticated texts of London satirists who challenged this practice as symbolising the corruption associated with luxury and commerce. Challenges to this practice, which involved some of the century’s most brilliant pens, from Sir John Vanburgh to William Hogarth and James Gillray, have been neglected by intellectual historians because of a tendency to treat visual sources as illustrations, rather than as significant contributions to political theory and debate. This essay argues that such an approach has resulted in an impoverished intellectual history and that images – and even snuffboxes themselves, used in highly articulated ritual performances of politeness and satirised in highly gendered terms – should be regarded as ‘texts’ and ‘idioms’ in the politics of politeness and patronage. It highlights Cambridge school contextualism as a method by which such texts may be read productively.

Księżycowa kołysanka. O jednej odzie maryjnej Alberta Inesa

The aim of this paper is to analyze and interpret the ode by Albert Ines, Ad Virginem Matrem. Cynthiam suam. In cuiusdam diei crepusculo (Lyr. 57). First the author cites the original lyrics written in Latin in Alcaic stanzas, and its poetic translation by the author of this paper. Next, the previous reception of the poem is discussed and the motifs analyzed in the context of intellectual history (time and transience, melancholy of twilight) and sensual experiences and its religious symbolism (contemplation of the sky, the moon as a figure of Virgin Mary). The paper points out the strong bond of the poet with Mary treated as a Muse, guide and object of pure, innocent love.

Droit au coeur de la science politique

Summary This article serves as a prolegomenon to further studies on the political and legal thought of Jean de Chokier (1571–1656). Trained in Roman law and canon law at the University of Orléans, he became one of the most prominent canon lawyers, political thinkers and humanist scholar of the Principality of Liège, an Imperial State situated in the Western part of the Holy Roman Empire. Author of major works in canon law, history and political science, he became vicar general of the Diocese of Liège under Prince-Bishops Ferdinand and Maximilian-Henri of Bavaria, successively. He belonged to the Neo-Stoic network around Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), the humanist jurist from Overijse. Inspired by this intellectual movement, Chokier published legal, political, historical and literary treatises next to performing his duties as an ecclesiastical administrator. His life and writings reflect the osmosis between humanist erudition, political commitment and legal knowledge that characterized the careers of many of the great jurists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering that Chokier was foremostly trained as a canon lawyer and also professionally active in this domain, this article invites readers to take a fresh look at Chokier’s political and juridical oeuvre from a canon law perspective.

History of ideas, essay history and intellectual history in Latin America (20th century).

En este artículo por medio de una revisión de la historia intelectual se analiza la consolidación de la figura intelectual en Francia con el Affaire Dreyfus en 1898 para entender las diferencias con la historia de las ideas. Este artículo muestra donde surgió la popularidad de la palabra “intelectual” lo que permite establecer acuerdos y desacuerdos entre: historia de las ideas, historia del ensayo e historia intelectual en Latinoamérica en el siglo XX. Como lo han demostrado investigadores la popularidad del sustantivo o adjetivo “intelectual” se relaciona con el Affaire Dreyfus en 1898, coyuntura que también es considerada el nacimiento del grupo de intelectuales. Así, por medio de este artículo se comprenderá que no son intelectuales todos los ensayistas o quienes escribieron textos para la historia de las ideas.

From History of Economic Thought to Intellectual History of Economics

Ever since the first edition of Economic Theory in Retrospect, written by Mark Blaug and published in 1962, the distinction between ‘rational reconstruction’ and ‘historical reconstruction’ has been a central topic of debate regarding theory vs. methodology within the field of History of Economic Thought (HET). This text aims to examine these discussions and the theoretical challenges that have been the consequences of those debates with the objective of diluting the dichotomy in order to make the argument that it is possible to increase productivity by focusing more on what exactly Intellectual History of Economics actually is.